St. George's church

This guide to St. George's Church in Cairo starts with a staircase locals once refused to walk down, dropping into a Roman defensive tower built more than nineteen hundred years ago to guard the fortress of Babylon's Nile crossing. It traces how a church was later raised directly on that tower and kept its round shape, how a fire in 1904 gutted the building, and how the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate rebuilt it by 1909. You'll also hear a sixteenth-century Russian traveler's account of an icon of Saint George kept behind bronze bars, already known for healings, and about the spring moulid that still draws crowds into the round nave.